Monday, 14 May 2012

New cracked asphalt

Hello, there have been some days when I could not work on the mod, but this weekend I finished a new broken asphalt.

This was one of the major objectives for the new version of the mod, as the broken asphalt for version 3.0 was my first road texture and could be improved considerably.
The original texture from crytek had several problems:

- Used in 99% of the game roads.
- It has a 1024x1024 resolution, insufficient for the large area occupied
- Use a very small pattern of cracks, so there is much repetition.

These are the cracks in the original texture

You can see all occurrences. Based on textures I make these months I've learned it's much better to use every pixel of a texture to provide unique information. Or at least, as unique as possible.

I used several pictures of cracks and have been retouched by hand to get something similar, without recurrence, and that had a dignified appearance at 2Kx2K (which is not excessive resolution given the large number of cracks that requires texture).

First test

Searching patterns

Original texture used in FDR (Lately I posted many screenshots of FDR, but the textures, roads and decals created here will serve me for all levels of the game.)

New texture, mid range

open angle

Close look

For roughness detail, I used a bump detail layer. The problem with this solution is that in the shadowed areas (where not exposed to light), texture appears not only flat, but with less detail. Replacing the bump detail layer by a standard detail layer is even worse. When it is displayed, the texture is also quite flat (use a general bump texture of the same resolution as the diffuse layer is crazy), and also have the problem that the engine does not display standard detail layers when intensive memory use (my mod, for example). One solution might be to modify the engine so a material can have two detail layers, one for diffuse overlapping and one for detail bump. The mask to change between them should be the shadow map acting on the textures. Thus, the highlights would have the rugged bump and detail diffuse in dark areas. Does anyone in crytek see this possible? XD

I tried also to create a 4Kx4K version to appreciate the difference in detail in the shadowed areas, but I think the bottom line in areas where light does not offset the brutal use of texture memory required. The texture takes up 2.5 megabytes for 2Kx2K and 10 megabytes!! for 4Kx4K. And the roads use it many times.

2K version

4K version

4K shadowed detail

Light/Shadow 4K versus 2K

This morning I made ​​pictures of small spots of oil on the asphalt. I will create decals of these spots to place them randomly on the roads.

I want do a new floating junk texture, some wakeup here and there, finish TOD in some levels and that's all. The time available will vary each week so I can not estimate a release date. More or less I need about 20 work hours to complete.

2K look better. The 4k texture is fantastic in close (ScreenShot0433 is fabolous) but the way texture look (many little rocks varying color) create too much sharpness/crisp in distance. Working a bit the texture could trurn this perfect to all distances.

I will not recommend MaldoHD mod to anyone.. I just completed Crysis 2 with this mod but there is no way I could play other games now :D Even Alan Wake and Battlefield 3 looks like ps2 title compared to this :D.I'm amazed :),